Transforming Talk at Work | August 2016

Not long ago my 17-year-old son and I went on a hike on Usery Mountain just north of Mesa, Arizona. We trecked up the Pass Mountain Trail, a seven-mile loop around the mountain which summits about two thirds of the way along the trail.

It wasn’t a particularly arduous climb but the intensity was elevated for us because we were pressed for time: he was catching a flight back home to Minneapolis in just a few hours. We had less time to do the hike than we would have liked. As I raced across the mountain, numerous leadership lessons surfaced.

All told, there are 20 of them and in the coming weeks I will document all of them. With titles like “You will probably not crash to your death” and “Sometimes it is best not to look down” and “Don’t go it alone,” I share the leadership lessons that showed up for me on the mountain.

These leadership lessons will help you communicate and lead more effectively whether you lead from the board room or the lunch room.

And, if you find it valuable to distill the lessons from commonplace activities like I do, use the following steps to reverse engineer and find gold in everyday activities.

Reverse Engineer: Extracting lessons from a commonplace activity

1. Pay attention. Have a keen eye for detail in all that you do. Take note (literally) when something piques your interest. (I used the voice recorder on my mobile phone to record the leadership lessons as they occurred to me on the mountain.) There is probably a larger lesson if you look closely.

2. Step away. Let the activity and the idea marinate in your subconscious. Do something different for a while and let the lesson emerge organically.

3. Ask: What is this like? If a lesson or a moral to the story isn’t readily apparent, ask yourself “What is this situation like?” Your answer, structured as a metaphor or a simile will serve up the lesson. For example, “I felt like I was lost at sea” or “The energy in the room was as dry as the desert” or “I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me.”

4. Distill the lesson. The metaphorical language from the previous step will lead you to the lesson. Once you have distilled the essence of the experience clearly in your mind, you can share the lesson with your staff, your teenager or whomever would benefit from hearing it.

Digest This: Leadership Lessons from the Hiking Trail

This month I extract the 20 leadership lessons that surfaced as I hiked the Mountain Pass Trail on Usery Mountain in Arizona. Here are some of my favorites so far:

Lesson #1: Starting together means nothing
I was mortified when my 17-year-old son took off up the mountain without me. His spirit animal is a mountain goat, he later told me, and that sure-footing and agility showed as he left me, quite literally, in the dust. Agony and anger gave way to some surprises. Read on for a full account of the first lesson.